PART THREE 7 страница

Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future.

The dark-haired and very beautiful woman in a black dress, sitting to his left, was the sultry Donatella, his wife.

I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.

How the fuck had I ended up with these people?

‘That’s ironic, ’ the salt-and-pepper guy was saying to someone, ‘the choosing of a better future. ’

‘What’s so ironic about that? ’ I heard myself saying, and then sighing impatiently. ‘If you don’t choose your future, who the hell’s going to do it for you? ’

‘Well, ’ said Donatella Alvarez, smiling across the table – and smiling directly at me - ‘that is the North American way, isn’t it, Mr Cole? ’

‘I beg your pardon? ’ I said, a little taken aback.

‘Time, ’ she said calmly. ‘For you it is in a straight line. You look back at the past, and can disregard it if you so wish. You look towards the future… and, if you so wish, can choose it to be a better future. You can choose to become perfect…’

She was still smiling, and all I could say was, ‘So? ’

‘For us, in Mexico, ’ she said very deliberately, as though explaining something to a small child, ‘the past and the present and the future… they co-exist. ’

I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.

From this point on things got more and more fragmented, disjointed – jagged. Most of it I can’t remember at all – apart from a few strong sense impressions, the weird colour and texture of mussels in white wine, for instance… swirls of dense cigar smoke, thick, glistening daubs of colour. I seem to recall seeing hundreds of tubes and brushes laid out in lines on a wooden floor, and dozens of canvases, some rolled, others framed and stacked.

Soon, painted figures, lurid and bulging, were mingling with real people in a terrifying kaleidoscope, and I found myself reaching out for something to lean against, but quickly focusing instead – across a crowded loft space – on the deep, earthy pools that were the eyes of Donatella Alvarez…

Next, and in what seemed like a flash, I was walking down an empty corridor in a hotel… having been in a room, quite definitely been in a room, but with no recollection of whose room, or of what had happened in that room, or of how I’d wound up there in the first place. Then, another flash and I wasn’t in a hotel corridor any more but walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, quickly, and in time to something – in time, I soon realized, to the suspension cables flickering in geometric patterns against the pale blue of the early morning sky.

I stopped and turned around.

I looked back at the familiar postcard view of downtown Manhattan, aware now that I couldn’t properly account for the last eight hours of my life – but aware, too, that I was fully conscious again, and alert and cold and sore all over. I quickly decided that whatever reasons I’d had for walking to Brooklyn had surely atrophied by now, seized up, been lost to some fossilized energy configuration that could never be re-animated. So I headed back over the bridge towards downtown, and walked – limped, as it turned out – all the way home to my apartment on Tenth Street.

I SAYLIMPED, because I had obviously sprained my left ankle at some point during the night. And when I was getting undressed to take a shower, I saw that there was extensive bruising on my body. This explained the soreness – or partly explained it – but in addition to these leaden blue patches on my chest and ribs, there was something else… something that looked curiously like a cigarette burn on my right forearm. I ran a finger over the small reddish mark, pressed it, winced, then circled it slowly – and as I did so, I felt a deep sense of unease, an incipient terror, tightening its grip around my solar plexus.

But I resisted, because I didn’t want to think about this – didn’t want to think about what may or may not have gone on in some hotel room, didn’t want to think about any of it. I had a meeting with Carl Van Loon and Hank Atwood in a few hours’ time and what I needed more than anything else – certainly more than I needed a debilitating panic attack – was to get myself organized.

And focused.

So I took two more pills, shaved, got dressed and started going over the notes I’d made the previous day.

The arrangement with Van Loon was that I’d show up at his office on Forty-eighth Street at around 10 a. m. We’d have a talk about the situation, compare notes and maybe devise a provisional gameplan. Then we’d go to meet Hank Atwood for lunch.

In the cab on the way to Forty-eighth Street, I tried to concentrate on the intricacies of corporate financing, but I kept being appalled anew at what had happened and at the degree of recklessness I was clearly capable of.

An eight-hour blackout?

Might that not just have constituted a warning sign?

But then I remembered getting sick in a bathroom once, years ago – actually throwing up blood into the washbasin – and immediately afterwards going back out to the living-room, to the little pile of product in the centre of the table… and to the cigarettes and to the vodka and to the elastic, malleable, untrackable conversation…

And then – twenty minutes later – having it happen again.

And again.

So… obviously not.

I stopped the cab at Forty-seventh Street and walked the remaining block to the Van Loon Building. By the time I got into the lobby, I had just about managed to suppress my limp. I was greeted by Van Loon’s personal assistant and taken up to a large suite of offices on the sixty-second floor. I noticed that in the general design of the place – in the corridors and in the enormous reception area – there was an impeccable though slightly bewildering blend of the traditional and the modern, the stuffy and the streamlined – a sumptuous, seamless fusion of mahogany, ebony, marble, steel, chrome and glass. This made the company seem, at once, like an august, venerable institution and a pared-down, front-line operation – staffed mostly, I have to say, by guys about fifteen years my junior. Nevertheless, I had a keen sense that nothing here was beyond me, that it was all for the taking, that the corporate structure of a place like this was delicate and gossamer-thin and would yield to the slightest pressure.

But as I sat down in the reception area, beneath a huge Van Loon & Associates company logo, my mood shifted again, lurched a little closer to the edge, and I was assailed by queasiness and doubt.

How had I ended up here?

How had I come to be working for a private investment bank?

Why was I wearing a suit?

Who was I?

I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions even now. In fact, a few moments ago – in the bathroom of the Northview Motor Lodge – staring into the mugshot-sized mirror above the stained wash-basin, with the hum and occasional rattle of the ice-machine outside penetrating the walls, and my skull, I struggled to see even a trace of the individual that had begun to form and crystallize out of that mass of chemically-induced impulses and counter-impulses, out of that irresistible surge of busyness. I searched, too, in the lines of my face for any indications of the individual I might eventually have become – a big-time player, a destroyer, a spiritual descendant of Jay Gould – but all there was in my reflection, all I recognized, with no real indications of anything the future might have held, was me … the familiar face of a thousand shaves.

I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was extremely friendly and smiled over at me every now and again. When Van Loon finally arrived, he strolled across reception with a broad smile on his face. He slapped me on the back and ushered me into his office, which was about half the size of Rhode Island.

‘Sorry for the delay, Eddie, but I’ve been overseas. ’

Flicking through some documents on his desk, he then explained that he’d flown in direct from Tokyo on his new Gulfstream V.

‘You’ve been to Tokyo and back since Tuesday evening? ’ I asked.

He nodded and said that having waited sixteen months to get the new jet, he’d wanted to make sure that it was worth its not inconsiderable price tag of $37m and change. His delay in arriving this morning, he added after a pause, had had nothing to do with the jet, but was rather the fault of gridlocked Manhattan traffic. It seemed to matter to him that I understood this.

I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.

‘So, Eddie, ’ he said, sitting down behind the desk, and indicating that I should sit down too, ‘did you have a chance to look at those files? ’

‘Yes, of course. ’

‘And? ’

‘They were interesting. ’

‘And? ’

‘I don’t think you should really have much difficulty justifying the price that MCL is asking, ’ I began, shifting in the seat, aware suddenly of how tired I was.

‘Why not? ’

‘Because there are some very significant options embedded in this deal, strategic stuff that isn’t evident in the existing numbers. ’

‘Such as? ’

‘Well, the biggest option value lies in the build-out of a broadband infrastructure, which is something Abraxas really needs…’

‘Why? ’

‘To defend itself against aggressive competition – some other portal that might be in a position to develop faster downloads, streaming video, that kind of thing. ’

As I spoke – and through the almost hallucinatory quality of my exhaustion – I was becoming conscious of how large a gap there was between information and knowledge, between the huge amount of data I’d absorbed in the last forty-eight hours and the arrangement of that data into a coherent argument.

‘The thing is, ’ I went on, ‘building-out broadband is a big cash drain and highly risky, but since Abraxas has a leading portal brand already, all it really needs is a credible threat to develop its own broadband. ’

Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.

‘So, by buying MCL, Abraxas gets that credibility, without actually having to complete the build-out, at least not straightaway. ’

‘How’s that? ’

‘MCL owns Cableplex, yeah? That puts them directly into twenty-five million homes, so even though they might need to upgrade their systems they’re ahead of the game. Meanwhile, Abraxas can slow down MCL’s spend on the broadband build-out, thereby delaying any negative cashflow, but retaining the option to develop it later should they need to…’ I was having a sensation I’d had a couple of times before on MDT – one of walking on a verbal tightrope, of speaking to someone and clearly making sense, but at the same time of having no idea at all what I was talking about. ‘… and remember, Carl, the ability to delay an investment decision like that can have enormous value. ’

‘But it still remains risky, doesn’t it? I mean, developing this broadband thing? Regardless of whether you do it now or later? ’

‘Sure, but the new company that comes out of this deal probably won’t have to make the investment in any case, because I think they’d actually be better off negotiating a deal with another broadband player, which would have the added advantage of reducing potential overcapacity in the industry. ’

Van Loon smiled.

‘That’s pretty fucking good, Eddie. ’

I smiled too.

‘Yeah, I think it works. It’s basically a win-win situation. And there are other options as well, of course. ’

I could see Van Loon looking at me and wondering. He was obviously unsure of what to ask me next… in case it all fell apart and I somehow revealed myself to be an idiot. But he eventually asked me the only question that made any sense in the circumstances.

‘How do the numbers add up? ’

I reached out and took a legal pad from his desk, and a pen from my inside jacket pocket. I leant forward and started writing. After I’d gotten a few lines down on the page, I said, ‘I’ve used the Black-Scholes pricing model to show how the option value varies as a percentage of the underlying investment…’ – I stopped, flipped over the page and continued writing at the top of the next one – ‘… and I’ve done it over a range of risk profiles and time-frames. ’

I wrote furiously for the next fifteen minutes or so, copying from memory the various mathematical formulae I’d used the previous day to illustrate my position.

‘As you can see here, ’ I said, when I’d finished, pointing to the appropriate formulae with my pen, ‘the value of the broadband option together with these other options easily adds an extra $10 a share in value to the MCL stock. ’

Van Loon smiled again.

Then he said, ‘This is just great work, Eddie. I don’t know what to say. This is just great. Hank’s going to love this. ’

At about twelve-fifteen, after we’d gone through all the figures carefully, we wrapped up and left the office. Van Loon had booked a table for us at the Four Seasons. We made our way over towards Park Avenue and then strolled the four blocks uptown to the Seagram Building.

I had floated along during most of the morning in an icy and exhausted state of awareness – on automatic pilot in a way – but when I arrived with Van Loon at the Fifty-second Street entrance to the Four Seasons restaurant, and passed through the lobby, and saw the Mir& #243; tapestries and the leather seats designed by Mies van der Rohe himself, I began to feel energized again. More than being able to speak Italian, or read half a dozen books in a night, or even second-guess the markets, more than the fact that I had just outlined the financial structure for a huge corporate merger, it was being here, at the base of the Seagram Building, the holy of architectural holies, that brought the unreality of my entire situation home to me – because under normal circumstances I would never have found myself in a place like this, would never have found myself swanning into the legendary Grill Room, with its suspended bronze rods and French walnut panelling, would never have found myself gliding past tables occupied by ambassadors and cardinals and corporation presidents and entertainment lawyers and network anchormen.

And yet, strange as it seemed, here I was… happy to be swanning and gliding…

The ma& #238; tre d ’ led us to one of the tables under the balcony, and just as we’d settled down and ordered some drinks Van Loon’s cellphone went off. He answered it with a barely audible grunt, listened for a couple of moments and then flicked it closed. As he was putting it away, he looked at me with a thin, slightly nervous smile.

‘Hank’s running a little late, ’ he said.

‘But he’s coming, right? ’

‘Yes. ’ Van Loon fiddled with his napkin for a moment, and then said, ‘Listen, Eddie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. ’

I swallowed, unsure of what was coming next.

‘You know that we have a small trading floor at Van Loon & Associates? ’

I shook my head.

‘Well, we have, and I was thinking – that run of trades you made at Lafayette? ’

‘Yeah? ’

‘That was pretty impressive, you know. ’

A waiter arrived over with our drinks.

‘I didn’t really think so when Kevin told me about it at first, but I’ve looked into it since, and well…’ – he held my gaze as the waiter laid out two glasses on the table, plus two half-bottles of mineral water, a Tom Collins and a vodka Martini – ‘… you certainly seem to know what you’re doing. ’

I took a sip from the Martini.

Still staring at me, Van Loon added, ‘And how to pick them. ’

I could see that he was burning to ask me how I’d done it. He kept shifting in his seat and glancing directly at me, unsure of what he had in his possession, tantalized at the prospect that maybe I did have some system after all, and that the Holy Grail was right here in the Four Seasons restaurant, sitting at his table. He was tantalized, and at the same time a little apprehensive, but he held off, skirted around the issue, tried to act as if the whole thing wasn’t that big a deal. There was something pathetic and awkward about the way he did this, though – it was ham-fisted, and I began to feel a mild contempt for him stirring inside me.

But if he had asked me straight out, what would I have said? Would I have been able to bluff my way through some yarn about complexity theory and advanced mathematics? Would I have leant forward in my chair, tapped my right temple and whispered un-derstand-ing, Carl? Would I have told him that I actually was on special medication, and that I had occasional visions of the Virgin Mary, to boot? Would I have told him the truth? Would I have been able to resist?

I don’t know.

I never got the chance to find out.

A few moments later, a friend of Van Loon’s appeared from across the room and sat at our table. Van Loon introduced me and we all engaged in small talk for a few moments, but pretty quickly the two older men got to discussing Van Loon’s Gulfstream, and I was happy to fade into the background. I could see that Van Loon was agitated, though – torn between not wanting to let me out of his immediate sphere of attention and not wanting to disengage from the conversation with his billionaire crony. But I was already gone, my mind drifting into a contemplation of the impending arrival of Hank Atwood.

From the various profiles I’d read of him, something had become clear to me about the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus. Even though he was a ‘suit’, a grey corporate executive who mainly concerned himself with what most people thought of as the tedious business of numbers and percentage points, Henry Bryant Atwood was a glamorous figure. There had been larger-than-life ‘suits’ before him, of course – in newspapers, and in the early days of Hollywood, all those cigar-toting moguls who couldn’t speak English, for example – but it hadn’t taken long, in the case of Hollywood, for the ivy-league accountants on the East Coast to step in and take the reins. What most people didn’t understand, however, was that since the full-steam-ahead corporatization of the entertainment business in the 1980s, the centre of gravity had shifted again. Actors and singers and supermodels were still glamorous, sure, but the rarefied air of pure glamour had quietly wafted its way back in the direction of the grey-suited moneymen.

Hank Atwood was glamorous, not because he was good-looking, which he wasn’t, and not even because the product he pedalled was the very stuff of people’s dreams – the genetically modified food of the world’s imagination – Hank Atwood was glamorous because of the unimaginably huge amounts of money he made.

And that was the thing. Artistic content was dead, something to be decided by committee. True content now resided in the numbers – and numbers, large numbers, were everywhere. Thirty-seven million dollars for a private jet. A lawsuit settled for $250 million. A $30 billion leveraged buyout. Personal wealth amounting to something in excess of $100 billion …

And it was at that point – while I was in the middle of this reverie of infinite numerical expansion – that things started to unravel.

For whatever reason, I suddenly became aware of the people sitting at the table behind me. They were a man and a woman, maybe a real-estate developer and an executive producer, or two trial lawyers – I didn’t know, I wasn’t focused on what they were saying – but there was something in the tone of the man’s voice that cut through me like a knife.

I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large, predatory birds perched deep in some arid canyon – but ageing ones, with drooping heads and rheumy eyes, old buzzards. Van Loon was involved in a detailed explanation of how he’d been driven to sound-proofing his previous jet, a Challenger something-or-other, and it was during this little monologue that a curious thing happened in my brain. Like a radio receiver automatically switching frequencies, it closed out Carl Van Loon’s voice, ‘… you see, to avoid undue vibrations, you need these isolator things to wrap around the bolts that connect the interior to the airframe – silicone rubber isolators, I think they’re called…’ and started receiving the voice of the guy behind me, ‘… in a big hotel downtown somewhere… it was on a news bulletin earlier… yeah, Donatella Alvarez, the painter’s wife, found on the floor of a hotel room, she’d been attacked apparently, blow to the head… and now she’s in a coma – but it seems they’ve got a lead already – a cleaner at the hotel saw someone leaving the place early this morning, someone with a limp…’

I pushed my chair back a little.

… someone with a limp …

The voice behind me droned on, ‘… and of course her being Mexican doesn’t help with all of this stuff going on…’

I stood up, and for a split second it felt as if everyone in the restaurant had stopped what they were doing, had put their knives and forks down and were looking up, expecting me to address them – but they hadn’t, of course, and weren’t. Only Carl Van Loon was looking up at me, a mild flicker of concern in his eyes suddenly lurching into overdrive. I mouthed the word bathroom at him, turned away and started walking. I went quickly, moving between tables, and around tables, looking for the nearest exit.

But then I noticed someone approaching from the other side of the room – a short, balding man in a grey suit. It was Hank Atwood. I recognized him from magazine photographs. A second later we were passing each other, shuffling awkwardly between two tables, grunting politely. For a brief moment we were so close that I could smell his cologne.

I got outside on to Fifty-second Street and took in huge gulps of air. As I stood there on the sidewalk, looking around me, I had the sense that by joining the busy crowds out here I’d forfeited my right to be in the Grill Room, and that I wouldn’t be allowed back inside.

But right now I had no intention of going back inside, and about twenty minutes later I found myself wandering aimlessly down Park Avenue South, consciously suppressing my limp, racking my memory to see if I could recall anything. But there was nothing… I had been in a hotel room and could even see myself walking down an empty hotel corridor. But that was it, everything else was a blank.

I didn’t really believe, though… I mean… I didn’t… I couldn’t …

For the next half-hour, I walked – cutting left at Union Square, then right on First – and arrived back at my building in a complete daze. I walked up the stairs, holding on to the notion that perhaps I’d been hearing things in the restaurant, that I’d imagined it – that it had simply been another blip, a glitch. In any case, I was going to find out pretty soon, because if this thing really had happened, it would still be on the news, so all I had to do was tune in to the radio, or switch on one of the local TV channels…

But the first thing I noticed when I got into the apartment was the little red light flashing on my answering machine. Almost glad of the distraction, I reached down at once and flicked the ‘play’ button. Then I just stood there in my suit, like an idiot, staring out across the room, waiting to hear the message.

There was the low hum as the tape rewound, and then – click.

Beeep.

‘Hi… Eddie. It’s Melissa. I’ve been meaning to call you, I really have, but… you know how it is…’ Her voice was a little heavy, and a little slurred, but it was still Melissa’s voice, still Melissa, disembodied, filling up my living-room – ‘Then something occurred to me, my brother… was he giving you anything? I mean – I don’t want to talk about this over the phone, but… was he? Because…’ – I heard ice-cubes clinking in a glass – ‘… because if he was, you should know something… that stuff…’ – she paused here, as though composing herself – ‘that stuff – MDT-whatever – is really, really dangerous – I mean, you don’t know how dangerous. ’ I swallowed, and closed my eyes. ‘So look, Eddie, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong – but… just call me, OK… call me. ’

PART THREE

A TV NEWSCAST AT TWO O’CLOCK confirmed that Donatella Alvarez, the wife of the Mexican painter, had received a severe blow to the head and was now in a coma. The incident had taken place in a room on the fifteenth floor of a midtown hotel. There were few details given, and no mention was made of any man with a limp.

I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control hanging limply in my hand was actually doing something, but what else was I going to do that would be any better? Phone up Melissa and ask her if this was the kind of thing she’d had in mind?

Dangerous?

What – as in severe blow to the head dangerous? Hospitalization dangerous? Coma dangerous? Death dangerous?

Obviously, I had no intention of phoning her up with questions like these, but a part of me was riddled with anxiety none the less. Had I really done it? Was the same thing – or something like it – going to happen again? Did Melissa’s ‘dangerous’ mean dangerous to others, or simply dangerous to me?

Was I being hugely irresponsible?

What the fuck was going on?

As the afternoon progressed, I concentrated intently on each news bulletin, as though by sheer force of will I could somehow alter a key detail in the story – have it not be a hotel room, or have Donatella Alvarez not be in a coma. Between the bulletins, I watched cookery shows, live courtroom broadcasts, soaps, commercials, and was aware of myself – unable to help it – processing and storing random bits of useless information. Lay the chicken strips flat on a lightly oiled baking tray and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Call toll-free NOW for a 15 per cent markdown on The GUTbuster 2000 home work-out system. On several occasions during the afternoon, I glanced over at the phone and considered calling Melissa, but each time some override mechanism in my brain kicked in and I immediately found myself thinking about something else.

By six o’clock, the story had begun to flesh out considerably. After a reception at her husband’s Upper West Side studio, Donatella Alvarez had made her way to a midtown hotel, the Clifden, where she received a single blow to the head with a blunt instrument. The instrument had not as yet been identified, but a key question that remained unanswered was this: what had Se& #241; ora Alvarez been doing in a hotel room in the first place? Detectives were interviewing all the guests who’d attended the reception, and were especially interested in speaking to an individual named Thomas Cole.

I stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, perplexed, barely recognizing the name myself. Then the report moved on, and so did I. They gave personal information about the victim, as well as photographs and interviews with family members – all of which meant that before long a very human picture of the 43-year-old Se& #241; ora Alvarez had begun forming itself in the viewer’s mind. Here, apparently, was a woman of rare physical and spiritual beauty. She was independent, generous, loyal, a loving wife, a devoted mother to twin baby girls, Pia and Flor. Her husband, Rodolfo Alvarez, was reported to be distraught and at a complete loss for any explanation as to what might have happened. They showed a black-and-white photograph of a radiant, uniformed schoolgirl attending a Dominican convent in Rome, circa 1971. They also showed some home-movie footage, flickering images in faded colour of a young Donatella in a summery dress walking through a rose garden. Other images included Donatella on horseback, Donatella at an archeological dig in Peru, Donatella and Rodolfo in Tibet.

The next phase in the reporting consisted of political analysis. Was this a racially motivated attack? Was it connected in some way to the current foreign policy d& #233; b& #226; cle? One commentator expressed the fear that it could be the first in a series of such incidents and blamed the attack squarely on the President’s bewildering failure to condemn Defense Secretary Caleb Hale’s intemperate remarks – or alleged remarks, since he was still denying that he’d actually made them. Another commentator seemed to feel that this was collateral damage of a kind we were simply going to have to get used to.

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